With 3D you will often find them sacrificing choreography in order to just kick/punch/throw straight into the camera, and that rarely results in a nice flowing fight TBH.

Apart from the 3D though, I'm just fucking disappointed they'll be going even MORE fictional with Ip Man than they already did.

Ip Man was already half biographical, half fantasy. Ip Man 2 was just ridiculous, especially with the retarded OTT white villain, and now Ip Man will be fighting a big fat Mike Tyson, cause hey, that's exactly the kind of stuff Ip man was up to back in his day...(!)

It's kinda like doing a new Malcom X movie, where he'll fight the X-Men.

I was there, the big BNB blackout of november, 2008. We lost many that day...

Yi-Long wrote:With 3D you will often find them sacrificing choreography in order to just kick/punch/throw straight into the camera, and that rarely results in a nice flowing fight TBH.

Apart from the 3D though, I'm just fucking disappointed they'll be going even MORE fictional with Ip Man than they already did.

Ip Man was already half biographical, half fantasy. Ip Man 2 was just ridiculous, especially with the retarded OTT white villain, and now Ip Man will be fighting a big fat Mike Tyson, cause hey, that's exactly the kind of stuff Ip man was up to back in his day...(!)

It's kinda like doing a new Malcom X movie, where he'll fight the X-Men.

The movie wasn't shot in 3D but there will a choice of watching it in 3D, like so many movies today. Difference there.

The Ip Man movies have always been fictional for the most part, like all movies in the same sub-genre. The 70s kung fu movies by Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, the 90s/early to mid 00's kung fu movies dominated by Jet Li. There's nothing to be disappointed at because that's how these movies are made.

Caught the aurally overloaded HK BD recently. They've included every format of HD audio for both Canto and Mandarin, which makes me wonder WTF they smoke over there when they come up with this shit, but anyway I found Ip Man 3 to be a frustratingly uneven final chapter (which according to reports might not be so final). It's a Wilson Yip film so obviously it panders to the crowds with the most cloyingly cheap melodrama and xenophobic attitudes (all westerners in this are referred to a "foreign devils") and that can be hard to stomach.

The first half of the film is the problem, the plotline concerns Tyson's character muscling in on local territory by hiring an idiotic local gang leader to strong-arm a head teacher into selling his primary school, which happens to be frequented by the children of Ip Man and Cheung Tin-chi, an impoverished Wing Chun expert pulling rickshaws until he earns enough money to start his own school (and isn't above doing dirty work for the idiotic gang leader for extra cash). The film is borderline unwatchable when all this shit is going down because the plotting is just ridiculous and the racial undertones very annoying, but during all this nonsense there's another theme on the backburner that's continued from the previous entries in the series of Ip Man neglecting his duties as a husband to his hottie wife who's about half a foot taller than him (seriously guys, stop putting Xiong Dailin in heels when she has to share a scene with Donnie Yen, she looks like she's about to devour him!).

Anyway this subplot moves to the fore in the second half when she's diagnosed with cancer and Ip Man has to get his priorities right, which coincides with the inexplicably rapid conclusion of Mike Tyson's plotline so we can switch straight into full melodrama mode, but it's the right type of melodrama this time and it's actually moving in places, mostly because Donnie Yen's performance is excellent (maybe a career highlight) and we've grown to love these characters by now, right?

Yuen Woo Ping replaces Sammo as Action Director this time round and that comes with the usual strengths and weaknesses, the action is creative and frenetic but it lacks the impact and authenticity that Sammo brought to the previous films. Wing Chun as a martial arts form is well represented overall, but Woo Ping clearly doesn't really understand boxing and choreographs Tyson as if he was using Streetfighter II as a storyboard reference. Don't get me wrong the fight between him and Yen is good stuff, it's just not really Boxing vs Wing Chun, it's Tyson shuffling through a Yuen Woo Ping fight sequence.

But hey, a Yuen Woo Ping fight sequence is usually pretty great and the final fight delivers (even if Ping relies a little too much on recycled shots/poses these days), but the real action highlight of the film is a brilliant little fight sequence where Ip Man is accosted by a Thai fighter as he's exiting a hospital with his wife. The action starts off in a lift Three Days of the Condor style and then continues down the floors as Cheung Wing-sing rides the lift down. This is kinda the turning point of the film because it's a superb fight sequence counterpointed beautifully by Cheung's concern for her husband's safety, giving us grounded, realistic drama for the first time.

Ip Man 2 will always be the king for me. YWP did a good job but certainly didn't better the action Sammo delivered with the first 2. Sammo really does have a seemingly endless imagination when it comes to choreography.

They've been playing lots of footage of Ip Man 3 in local stores here, and the fights seem OK. I always had my doubts about the plot, and it seems it's somewhere between the pretty damn good Ip Man, and the ridiculously bad Ip Man 2.

Not sure if they'll butcher the western release or not, though. I believe the first 2 movies made it through uncut.

I was there, the big BNB blackout of november, 2008. We lost many that day...